


He Starts to Draw Her Face

by Anarfea



Series: Tumblr Ficlets [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Drawing, F/M, Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 19:26:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7946248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anarfea/pseuds/Anarfea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At first, it’s doodles on the back of receipts, which he’s careful to dispose of lest they track john’s attention. Then in the margins of his notebooks, when he’s supposed to be documenting experiments. Finally, the too-thin curve of her lips (which seem fetchingly impish now) the dark, sprite-like eyes, start to look back at him when he’s supposed to be drawing the cells on his slides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Starts to Draw Her Face

He starts to draw her face. At first, it’s doodles on the back of receipts, which he’s careful to dispose of lest they track john’s attention. Then in the margins of his notebooks, when he’s supposed to be documenting experiments. Finally, the too-thin curve of her lips (which seem fetchingly impish now) the dark, sprite-like eyes, start to look back at him when he’s supposed to be drawing the cells on his slides.

Molly Hooper glances at him from across her microscope. If she knows he’s drawing her and not the culture in the petri dish in front of him, she doesn’t let on. She brushes a strand of hair behind her ear. He sketches the heart shape of her hairline, the upturned lilt of her nose, the hollow at the base of her throat framed in the ‘v’ of her lab coat.

He’s afraid of the way she looks at him. The frankness of her adoration is unnerving. She is naked and brave in her vulnerability, and he turns up the collar of his coat and feigns the icy composure of the brother who provokes admiration and annoyance in equal measure.

He prefers to watch her when she can’t see him. When her face scrunches as she wriggles her fingers into a nitrile glove, when she chokes on her coffee because it’s too hot, when she applies the lipstick she wears to make her lips look bigger-–he contemplates telling her red lipstick makes lips look thin, that she’d do better to wear a glossy nude, but bites his tongue. Anyway, he’s privately come to think she looks better without.

He turns over the page of his notebook when she walks in his direction, starts drawing the bacteria culture in earnest. It’s growing rapidly, clouding the lid of the petri dish, like this feeling he has for Molly which he cannot name. He knows only that she matters in ways he’s as yet unable to quantify. He knows his eyes linger on the delicate curve of her ears, the soft line of her jaw, the little divots in her cheeks when she smiles.

When she leaves the laboratory, asking if he wants crisps from the vending machine (he ignores her), he puts his pencil to the blank page he has just turned over and starts to draw her face.


End file.
